Twitter CEO: Service should run like water; company looking for translators

In an address at a telecommunications conference Monday in Spain, Twitter Inc. CEO Dick Costolo said he wants to make the micro blogging service as easy and ubiquitous as tap water.

“We’ll be successful if we’re instant, simple and always present,” Costolo said during a keynote at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Costolo touched on several topics, from Twitter’s role in the revolution in Egypt to its role as an enabler of social television watching. He said the San Francisco company’s challenge is to make the service appear and work the same across all platforms, including all mobile devices.

He announced the company has launched a new Twitter Translation Center, which is seeking volunteers to help translate the site into French, Indonesian, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

Twitter has crowd sourced translations since 2009. But the new service will help translators continue updating the site and the company plans to add other languages like Portuguese later this year.

Spokeswoman Carolyn Penner said the company isn’t trying to accomplish the monstrous task of translating the entire stream of tweets – during the Super Bowl, there were as many as 4,000 tweets per second. The idea is to localize the main site and smart phone apps.

In his speech, Costolo continued with the water analogy when he commented about the role Twitter and Facebook played in the grassroots revolution that toppled longtime Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and other uprisings in the Middle East.

He downplayed the role of Twitter and Facebook in the revolution, saying the social networks were just a “very small piece of the puzzle.”

“It’s not our place to comment on whether we think we’re important or not,” Costolo said. “All we care to do is drive our mission, provide our mission to people and instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most meaningful to them. All of us created technologies that allowed these people to move forward in their hopes and dreams.”

“We were blocked in Egypt for a while, just like we’re blocked in China,” he said. “It doesn’t prevent them from using it completely, you’re just challenging them to find another way to use it. People will always find a way to communicate.”

Costolo also noted that the Arab news network Al Jazeera sponsored Promoted Tweets to drive more viewers in the U.S. of its coverage of events in Egypt.

And Costolo said that Twitter seems to be driving television viewers back to watching shows “live” instead of later on a DVR so they can use Twitter to share in a social TV experience.

For example, he said Twitter notices tweets per minute increase about 30 fold when the Fox network’s “Glee” is on the air. The “X Factor” game show in the United Kingdom also increases tweets.

Mobile World Congress has posted a video of the entire speech on its site (registration required).